The Population Story... So Far

The
Population Story...So Far

A generation ago, human population
growth became an explosive issue. Since then, it has largely disappeared from
the media. But the consequences of still-rising population colliding with fast-rising
resource consumption have in some respects worsened, and are bringing a whole
new set of concerns.

Forty years
ago, the world's women bore an average of six children each. Today, that number
is just below three. In 1960, 10-15 percent of married couples in developing
countries used a modern method of contraception; now, 60 percent do.

To a considerable extent, these
simple facts sum up the change in the Earth's human population prospects, then
and now. In the mid-1960s, it was not uncommon to think about the human
population as a time bomb. In 1971, population biologist Paul Ehrlich estimated
that if human numbers kept increasing at the high rates of the time, by around
2900 the planet would be teeming with sixty million billion people (that's
60,000,000,000,000,000). But the rate of population rise actually peaked in the
1960s and demographers expect a leveling-off of human numbers this century.

Every couple of years the United
Nations Population Division issues projections of human population growth to
2050. In 2002, UN demographers predicted a somewhat different picture of human
population growth to mid-century than what the "population bombers" thought
likely a generation ago. World population, growing by 76 million people every
year (about 240,000 people per day), will pass 6.4 billion this year. The
latest UN mid-range estimate says there will be about 8.9 billion people on
Earth by 2050. And, according to this new scenario, total population will begin
to shrink over the next hundred years.

These numbers are leading some
people to say that the population bomb has been defused. A few nations, such as
Italy and Japan, are even worried that birth rates are too low and that their
graying populations will be a drain on the economy. (Some studies suggest that
China, the world's most populous country, may also "need" more people to help
support the hundreds of millions who will retire in coming decades).

We're not out of the woods yet.
While the annual rate of population growth has decreased since 1970-from about
2 percent to 1.3 percent today-the rate is applied to
a much larger population than ever before, meaning that the added yearly
increments to the population are also much larger. These numbers show that the
largest generation in history has arrived: 1.2 billion people are between 10
and 19. In large measure, it will be their choices-those they have, and those
they make-that determine where the global population meter rests by
mid-century.

Population ¥ Consumption

Potential
for catastrophe persists. In many places, population growth is slowly
smoldering but could turn into a fast burn. Countries as diverse as Ethiopia,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Pakistan are poised to more than double
their size by 2050 even as supplies of water, forests, and food crops are
already showing signs of strain and other species are being squeezed into
smaller and smaller ranges. Arid Yemen will likely see its population quadruple
to 80 million by 2050. The UN estimates that populations in the world's 48 least-developed
countries could triple by 2050. And if the world's women have, on average, a
half a child more than the UN predicts, global population could grow to 10.6
billion by mid-century.

But it is a mistake to think that
population growth is only a problem for developing countries. While consumption
levels need to increase among the 2.8 billion people who now live on less than
$2 a day, high rates of population growth combined with high levels of
consumption in rich countries are taking a heavy toll on the Earth's natural
resources:

Carbon
dioxide levels today are 18 percent higher than in 1960 and an estimated 31
percent higher than they were at the onset of the Industrial Revolution in
1750.

Half the
world's original forest cover is gone and another 30 percent is degraded or
fragmented.

Industrial
fleets have fished out at least 90 percent of all large ocean predators-tuna,
marlin, swordfish, cod, halibut, skate, and flounder-in just the past 50 years,
according to a study in Nature in 2003.

An
estimated 10-20 percent of the world's cropland, and more than 70 percent of
the world's rangelands, are degraded.

As global consumption of oil, meat,
electricity, paper products, and a host of consumer goods rises, the impact of
population numbers takes on a new relevance. Although each new person increases
total demands on the Earth's resources, the size of each person's "ecological
footprint"-the biologically productive area required to support that
person-varies hugely from one to another. The largest ecofootprints belong to
those in the indus­trialized world.

Further, new demographic trends can
have significant impacts as well. Since 1970, the number of people living
together in one household has declined worldwide, as incomes have risen,
urbanization has accelerated and families have gotten smaller. With fewer
people sharing energy, appliances, and furnishings, consumption actually rises.
A one-person household in the United States uses about 17 percent more energy per person than a two-person home.

And while some nations are getting
nervous about declining birth rates, for most of the world the end of
population growth is anything but imminent. Although fertility rates are
ratcheting down, this trajectory is not guaranteed. Projections of slower population
growth assume that more couples will be able to choose to have smaller
families, and that investment in reproductive health keeps pace with rising
demand. But along the route to the eventual leveling-off of global population,
plateaus are possible. And smaller families are not guaranteed in countries
where government resources are strained or where health care, education, and
women's rights are low on the list of priorities.

In the West African country of
Niger, for example, the availability of family planning and reproductive health
services has declined, while birth rates have increased. According to a recent
report by the World Bank, the average woman in Niger will give birth to eight
children in her lifetime, up from seven in 1998 and more than women in any
other nation. Niger is already bulging with young people; 50 percent of the
population is under age 15 and 70 percent is under 25.

Biology ≠ Destiny

A series of
global conferences in the 1990s-spanning the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the
Cairo population conference (1994), the Beijing women's conference (1995), and
the UN's Millennium Summit in 2000-put issues of environment, development,
poverty, and women's rights on the global policy table. As a result,
discussions of the relationship between growing human numbers and the Earth's
ability to provide are increasingly framed by the realities of gender
relations. It is now generally agreed that while enabling larger numbers of
women and men to use modern methods of family planning is essential, it is not
sufficient. Expanding the choices, capacities, and agency of women has become a
central thread in the population story. Consumption-what we need and what we
want-is, too.

Many studies have shown that women
with more education have smaller, healthier families, and that their children
have a better chance of making it out of poverty. Likewise, wealthier women and
those with the right to make decisions about their lives and bodies also have
fewer children. And women who have the choice to delay marriage and
childbearing past their teens tend to have fewer children than those women-and
there are millions of them still-who marry before they've completed the
transition from adolescence. Equalizing relations between women and men is also
a social good: not only is it just, but a recent World Bank report found that
in developing countries where gender equality lags, efforts to combat poverty
and increase economic growth lag, too.

Yet women's rights and voices
remain suppressed or muted throughout the world. Over 100 million girls will be
married before their 18th birthdays in the next decade, some as young as 8 or
9. Early childbearing is the leading cause of death and disability for women
between the ages of 15 and 19 in developing countries. At least 350 million
women still lack access to a full range of contraceptive methods, 10 years
after the Cairo conference yielded a 20-year plan to balance the world's people
with its resources. Demand for services will increase an estimated 40 per cent
by 2025.

The assault of HIV/AIDS is also
increasingly hurting women: more than 18 million women are living with
HIV/AIDS, and in 2003 women's rate of infection for the first time equaled
men's. In the region hard­est hit, sub-Saharan Africa, 60 percent of adults living
with HIV are women. Two-thirds of the world's 876 million illiterates are women
and a majority of the 115 million children not attending grade school are
girls. In no country in the world are women judged to have political, economic,
and social power equal to that of men.

Even in the United States, women's
reproductive rights are increasingly constrained by the growing number of
restrictions and conditions on choice imposed by state and federal laws. Like
the U.S. lifestyle, the current Administration's blinkered view of sexuality
has gone global. The United States has withheld $34 million from the UN
Population Fund (UNFPA) every year of the Bush Administration due to a dispute
over abortion. And the "global gag rule," a relic of the Reagan presidency
reimposed by President Bush, binds U.S. population assistance by making taboo
any discussion of abortion in reproductive health clinics, even in countries
where it is legal.

The impacts reach more deeply than
the rhetoric: due to the loss of U.S. population funds, reproductive health
services have been scaled back or eliminated in some of the world's poorest
countries, precisely where fertility rates are highest and women's access to
family planning most tenuous. In Kenya, for instance, the two main providers of
reproductive health services refused to sign a pledge to enforce the gag rule,
with the result that they lost funds and closed five family planning clinics,
eliminating women's access to maternal health care, contraception, and
voluntary counseling and testing for HIV/AIDS. In Ethiopia, where only 6 per
cent of women use modern methods of contraception, the gag rule has cut a wide
swath: clinics have reduced services, laid off staff and curtailed community
health programs; many have suffered shortages of contraceptive supplies.

A recent
study by UNFPA and the Alan Guttmacher Institute estimated that meeting women's
current unmet need for contraception would prevent each year:

505,000
children losing their mothers due to pregnancy-related causes.

The non-medical benefits are not
quantified but are considerable: greater self-esteem and decision-making power
for women; higher productivity and income; increased health, nutrition, and
education expenditures on each child; higher savings and investment rates; and
increased equality between women and men. We know this from experience: recent
research in the United States, for example, ascribes the large numbers of women
entering law, medical, and other professional training programs in the 1970s to
the expanded choices afforded by the wide availability of the Pill.

Despite these benefits, vast needs
go unmet as the Cairo action plan remains underfunded. The United States is not
the only culprit. UNFPA reports that donor funds for a basic package of
reproductive health services and population data and policy work totaled about
$3.1 billion in 2003-$2.6 billion less than the level agreed to in the ICPD
Program. Developing country domestic resources were estimated at $11.7 billion,
a major portion of which is spent by just a handful of large countries. A
number of countries, particularly the poorest, rely heavily on donor funds to
provide services for family planning, reproductive health, and HIV/AIDS, and to
build data sets and craft needed policies.

A year from now, donors will be
expected to be contributing $6.1 billion annually, $3 billion more than what
has already been spent. "A world that spends $800 billion to $1 trillion each
year on the military can afford the equivalent of slightly more than one day's
military spending to close Cairo's $3 billion external funding gap to save and
improve the lives of millions of women and families in developing countries,"
says UNFPA's executive director, Thoraya Obaid. But as the world's priorities
lie in other arenas, it is looking increasingly unlikely that the Cairo
targets-despite their modest price tag in a world where the bill for a war can
top $100 billion-will be met.

But it isn't only poor people in
developing countries who will determine whether the more dire population
scenarios pass from speculation to reality. Family size has declined in most
wealthy nations, but the U.S. population grew by 32.7 million people (13.1
percent) during the 1990s, the largest number in any 10-year period in U.S.
history. At about 280 million people, the United States is now the third most
populous nation in the world and its population is expected to reach 400
million by 2050. A recent study suggests that if every person alive today
consumed at the rate of an average person in the United States, three more
planets would be required to fulfill these demands.

Whether or not birth rates continue
to fall, consumption levels and patterns (affluence), coupled with technology,
take on new importance. The global consumer class-around 1.7 billion people, or
more than a quarter of humanity-is growing rapidly. These people are
collectively responsible for the vast majority of meat-eating, paper use, car
driving, and energy consumption on the planet, as well as the resulting impact
of these activities on its natural resources. As populations surge in developing
countries and the world becomes increasingly globalized, more and more people
have access to, and the means to acquire, a greater diversity of products and
services than ever before.

It is the combined effect of human
numbers and human consumption that creates such potent flashpoints. Decisions
about sexuality and lifestyle are among the most deeply personal and political
decisions societies and their citizens can make. The fate of the human presence
on the Earth will be shaped in large part by those decisions and how their
implications unfold in the coming years. This population story's ending still ­hasn't
been written.

Danielle Nierenberg is a research associate at Worldwatch
and the author of Correcting Gender Myopia: Gender Equity, Women's
Welfare, and the Environment (Worldwatch Paper 161). Mia MacDonald is a policy analyst and freelance
writer and a Worldwatch Institute Senior Fellow.

References
and readings for each article are available at www.worldwatch.org/pubs/mag/.